Calhoun: American Heretic

by Robert Elder

Overview

A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession—the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today.

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union—and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.

Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as some observers connected the strain of radical politics he developed to the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right, and as protests over racial injustice have focused on his legacy. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is even more broadly significant than these events suggest, and that his story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising Calhoun from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465096442
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	204,889
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.50(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Robert Elder is an assistant professor of history at Baylor University, where his research focuses on the American South, and the author of The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the American South, 1790-1860. He holds a PhD from Emory University and lives in Woodway, Texas.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 The People with No Name 1

2 Educations 21

3 The Science of Law 44

4 "I Am Your True Lover, John C. Calhoun" 61

5 "The Road That All Great Nations Have Trod" 83

6 "The Great Gun of the Party" 99

7 "Let Us Conquer Space" 123

8 Secretary of Improvement and Empire 151

9 "To the Western Confines of the Continent" 174

10 "I Am with the People, and Shall Remain So" 198

11 "The Impression, That I Acted Under the Force of Destiny" 218

12 "There Shall Be at Least One Free State" 253

13 "I Think, I See My Way Clearly on the Slave Question" 291

14 "It Is Our Thermopylae" 317

15 "Dangerous and Despotic Doctrines" 344

16 "The True and Perfect Voice of the People" 370

17 "Thou Art the Man" 412

18 "Ours Is the Government of the White Man" 440

19 The Pillar of Fire 477

Epilogue 525

Acknowledgments 547

Notes 551

Index 623

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Historian Elder (The Sacred Mirror) reassesses the life and legacy of U.S. vice president and South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) in this comprehensive biography. Elder skillfully tracks Calhoun’s unusual political career trajectory, from his advocacy for war with England as a freshman congressman in 1811, to his modernization of the U.S. Army as secretary of war, resignation as Andrew Jackson’s vice president and return to Congress in 1832 as a strident advocate for states’ rights, and calls for a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in the weeks before his death in 1850. Elder scrutinizes Calhoun’s creative interpretations of the U.S. Constitution and forthrightly documents his deep-rooted belief in white supremacy, but understates his political failings, including his knack for turning allies into enemies and the single-mindedness that doomed his presidential ambitions and contributed to his brief and ineffectual tenure as secretary of state in 1844–1845. Still, Elder is a graceful writer who persuasively argues that the beliefs and policies Calhoun amplified continue to shape American politics. Readers with a keen interest in the pre–Civil War era and a strong stomach for objectionable viewpoints will gain insight from this expert account. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

An illuminating account of the life of the notorious white supremacist as well as his complex afterlife in American political culture….In his lucid book about this complex and contradictory figure, Robert Elder wisely refrains from assigning Calhoun to a stationary spot along the political spectrum….[A] valuable book.”
 —New York Times Book Review

“A timely and thought-provoking biography of the South Carolina statesman whose doctrines and debates set the stage for the Civil War. In the course of his chronicle, Mr. Elder traces how Calhoun’s thinking continues to influence American society today....[A] much-needed biography.”—Wall Street Journal

“There are some biographies which are almost impossible to write….John Caldwell Calhoun is one of those difficult subjects, something which the Baylor University historian Robert Elder acknowledges in the title of his new Calhoun biography….Still, Elder has the decency of compassion and never underestimates or burlesques Calhoun.”—The New Criterion

"Historian Elder reassesses the life and legacy of U.S. vice president and South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) in this comprehensive biography. Elder skillfully tracks Calhoun’s unusual political career trajectory, from his advocacy for war with England as a freshman congressman in 1811, to his modernization of the U.S. Army as secretary of war, resignation as Andrew Jackson’s vice president and return to Congress in 1832 as a strident advocate for states’ rights, and calls for a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in the weeks before his death in 1850.... Elder is a graceful writer who persuasively argues that the beliefs and policies Calhoun amplified continue to shape American politics."—Publishers Weekly

"A forcefully argued case for placing Calhoun at the center of any honest account of America's tangled past."—Kirkus

“This well-researched book offers a definitive account of Calhoun.”—Library Journal

"In this much-needed new biography, Robert Elder cuts through two hundred years of interpretive tangle to reveal Calhoun as he was and as he remains with us today—perhaps the most creative and darkly influential reactionary America has ever produced."—Matthew Karp, author of This Vast Southern Empire

"Because he was slavery's most eloquent defender as well as a founding father of the Confederacy, it's been difficult for scholars to come to terms with John C. Calhoun’s foundational role in America's political and social development. This engrossing biography reveals how the United States and one of its most prominent intellectuals grew in tandem during the first half of the nineteenth century. As much as we might like to forget Calhoun, Elder reveals just how short the path from his America to our own actually is."—Amy S. Greenberg, author of A Wicked War

"Robert Elder has written a brilliant reinterpretation of one of the most vital personalities in American history. Beautifully written, well argued, and carefully researched, Elder’s book offers an unflinching view of Calhoun's virtues and flaws and breaks new ground in revealing his significance as one of the first modern theorists of secession in the age of the nation-state. This is an ideal book to prompt conversations about our country’s difficult history."—Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln

"Through careful attention both to Calhoun's rhetoric and that of his political opponents, and to the global context for American debates, Elder sheds light on Calhoun's broad influence and enduring, tragic legacy. To understand the depth of American racism and the shape of Americans' ongoing contests over the scope of federal power, Elder argues, one must grapple with Calhoun's relentless campaign to impose his political will on South—to make his heresies into the region's orthodoxies. This book is a bracing reminder of how the genre of biography can explicate the history of ideas."—Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Armies of Deliverance

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2021

Elder's (history, Baylor Univ.) cultural and intellectual biography expertly recounts the life and times of John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), a political force from the 1810s through the 1840s. Although his presidential ambitions were unsuccessful, he represented South Carolina in the U.S. House and Senate. He served as James Monroe's Secretary of War and was Vice President to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, though he became political foes of both men. He was also, briefly, John Tyler's Secretary of State. But Calhoun is best remembered as one of the architects of Southern secession and a fervent defender of slavery as property, which he considered "one of the most essential rights of white citizens." In addition to detailing Calhoun's substantial career, Elder delves into his subject's political philosophy and influences. Elder gives ample space to Calhoun's personal life, including his marriage, children, illnesses, and constant financial struggles. He also assesses the politician's controversial legacy and the dismantling of his reputation. In a powerfully written epilogue, he states, "We do not have to honor John C. Calhoun, nor should we. But he has not left us the luxury of forgetting him." VERDICT This well-researched book offers a definitive account of Calhoun, and will appeal to anyone interested in early American history.—Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Library Journal

2020-11-18
The Southern politician and proto-secessionist comes in for a fresh appraisal.

Elder, a professor of history at Baylor, observes that the recent rise of conservative opposition to civil rights owes to the example of John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), a South Carolinian honored in his time for his analytical approach to problems of government. However, Calhoun also held the view that Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment philosophers who guided early American thought were wrong: All men are not created equal, and “freedom was not man’s natural state.” Instead, well before the Civil War, which his thought helped precipitate, Calhoun argued that the government of the U.S. was “the government of the white man” and that Southern expansion into places such as Texas meant that slavery should naturally be extended westward. Elder has an eye for nuance and ironic juxtaposition. Some of the slaveholders whom Calhoun championed feared that absorbing Texas into the U.S. “would devalue the worn-out land in older cotton-producing states.” Furthermore, Calhoun urged alliances with other slaveholding entities to thwart British expansion into the hemisphere, which would entail emancipation, then a policy of the crown. He also urged ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade in favor of “naturally reproducing enslaved populations.” Conflict with Northern abolitionists was the natural result, with Calhoun ever more clearly the intellectual leader of the emerging Southern cause. In one of his writings, Calhoun concocted a remedy for the growing rift between the industrial North and the agrarian South: He proposed “to amend the Constitution to institute a dual executive, one from each section, with each having a veto over any Congressional legislation.” If that proposal had been realized, slavery would likely still exist in some form in the U.S. Of course, as the author notes, “even today...there are numerous secession movements” that draw inspiration from him—good enough reason to pull his statue down, as Charleston did recently.

A forcefully argued case for placing Calhoun at the center of any honest account of America’s tangled past.

Kirkus Reviews